Achieving 24 Hour Turnaround From Sample Submission And Initial QC To Final Purified And Confirmed Drug Discovery Lead Compounds.

Pittcon 2011, Atlanta, GE March 13-18 2011, Mark Bayliss, Joseph Simpkins, Stephane Murphy, Martin Fuhr, Utz-Peter Jagusch, Josephine Archinal, Stefan Oberbörsch

Part of our drug discovery philosophy is to commence our lead evaluation with purified lead compounds that have been confirmed for presence and minimum acceptable purity prior to biological activity screening. The goal of a recent quality and performance improvement program was to reduce the time taken to analyze our lead compounds for target presence and purity, purify where necessary and then confirm the dried fraction(s) for target presence and final purity. On starting this improvement project our turnaround times were variable and typically required in excess of 3 – 4 days depending on the laboratory workload. Our goal was to be able to complete the entire turn-around time in 24 hours. Such a target required us to reevaluate our workflow in detail, increase levels of automation, increase quality of the automatically produced analytical results, decrease the time required for results review and reporting in each stage of the process. This presentation aims to describe how we collaborated with an external software company with extensive domain experience and our internal teams to achieve our primary objectives. We discuss the areas that required particular attention and how we have stepwise improved the hardware and software infra-structure with commercially available products, fine-tuned our workflow, optimized the integration of hardware, samples, sample information, and our existing company infra-structure in a cost effective manner.

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